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Santiam Hospital
November 3, 2026
A patient has filed a $5 million lawsuit against Santiam Hospital & Clinics in Marion County Circuit Court over an alleged hack by a cybercrime group.
The suit follows by just two days an announcement issued by Salem Health, which recently took over Santiam, that a “bad actor” had compromised patient data maintained by Santiam, and that patients and community members should not click on social media posts about the breach that may be scams.
The suit cites an online claim that the data breach was conducted by a prominent cybercrime organization, Anubis, that has claimed credit for breaching health systems and other companies with its ransomware.
Santiam was recently approved to be taken over by Salem Health. According to a Salem Health announcement, “we identified a bad actor [that] used deceptive social engineering tactics that resulted in unauthorized access.”
The breach only affected data controlled by Santiam, not that of Salem Health, according to the announcement. It’s unclear if data was destroyed and whether the health system was subject to, or paid, any ransom demands.
“We are working to quickly identify and then notify impacted individuals. We understand how concerning this is to our community,” the announcement stated. “All known risks have been contained.”
A Salem Health spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for details on what tactics were used and whether the health system received a ransom demand or paid it.
Patients can contact [email protected] for more information, according to Salem Health’s announcement.
On Nov. 2, attorneys from Seattle and Washington, D.C. jointly filed the lawsuit against Santiam on behalf of James Childers, a patient and Salem resident, accusing Santiam of failing to take adequate precautions to protect the data. It seeks to be certified as a class-action that would pursue compensation for those affected.
According to the suit, “Ransomlook.io, a dark web monitoring service, detected that the cybercriminal threat group Anubis had claimed responsibility for an attack on Defendant’s systems, describing the incident as ‘a major medical data breach.’”
Another hospital in Oregon, Sky Lakes Medical Center in Klamath Falls, was hit by a highly-publicized ransomware attack in 2020.
